Friday, July 29, 2005

I've been using RSS readers for a couple of years now to try to manage the 'River of News'.

This roughly follows the order in which I explored the world of aggregators.

AmphetaDesk -- web-based, runs on a server somewhere, perl-based. A nice solid news aggregator. There is a patch, AmphetaOutlines that improves the look-n-feel which I used. The only downside is it only supports RSS and not ATOM. It looks like RSS is going to win, but there are some sites out there (notably google's blogspot) that only provide ATOM feeds. I've used Amphetadesk the longest so far.

I attended the first meeting of the new NH Python SIG (PySIG) in Manchester last night. About 13 folks interested in programming in python.

My two pet projects that I'd like to write in python are "pull info from a spreadsheet and set title, description, tags, etc on specific photos already hosted on Flickr.com" (to support this genealogy project) and "pull info from a Zoph (nice, but defunct) web/MySQL-based photo organizer and dump it into the next great photo organizer (F-Stop? something else?) without loosing too much data"

Thursday, July 21, 2005

I've been running Debian/Sarge (now the stable branch) on my laptop for quite a while now and its time to try a new distro for dailyl use -- Ubuntu. This week I've been running Ubuntu 'Hoary' and the transition has been very smooth.

The only configuration issue was I wanted to use ALSA on this HP Compaq nc6000 laptop. The install did detect the sound device, but did separate the speaker fromthe headphone controls.

Thursday, July 14, 2005

The 138th Annual William Bull & Sarah Wells picnic is coming up in the next few weeks and I've been exchanging email with some distant cousins about ways to improve participation with the Bull Association and contribute genealogy info.

If you have any photos or scans of images having to do with the Bull picnic or any of the Bull descendants, please get a free flickr.com account and join the groups below. Once you have joined those groups, you'll be able to add your photos to the following groups:

Monday, July 4, 2005

In MemoriamReuben CummingsJune 25, 1761 September 13, 1776Merrimack's Only Casualty of the American Revolutionary WarAt age 14, enlisted as Minute ManFought at Battle of Bunker Hill june 17, 1775Promoted to Drummer July 20, 1776At age 15, he died and was buriedin the area of Ft. Ticonderoga